Midnight Visitor
by Zathara001
Summary: Peggy Carter receives an unexpected, late night visitor


NOTE:

This showed up to distract me while I was writing "Of Soulmates and Super-Soldiers," and of course I had to get it out of my head and onto paper. Or screen, either way. I blame **ozhawk** , because in a comment to her story "Bionic Battle Granny," she said that some people had requested Peggy meeting Bucky. Well, that idea stayed with me and this is the result. **Oz,** __this is for you.

As should be obvious, I don't own anything to do with the Avengers, Captain America, etc. All rights belong to Disney/Marvel, and all rights to this work are hereby given to same.

It had been a long time since Peggy Carter had paid attention to daytime and nighttime. She had enough difficulty remaining in the present to bother about such trivial things as the time, except when it came to taking her medication or visiting hours.

But now, judging by the drapery that was drawn shut in her convalescent room, it was quite definitely night time, which meant that visiting hours were most assuredly over.

So why, then, was a man standing in a shadowy corner opposite her bed?

Peggy hadn't been certain, at first, that he was truly there - sometimes her flashbacks to the war years came with visual stimulation - but now that she was certain he was real, the questions narrowed to two: who was he, and why was he here?

She might be able to answer the first, if she could see him better. She shifted in her bed, trying to make it seem as though she were simply having a restless night. She must have failed, or perhaps she succeeded too well, because he took a half-step forward into a bit of moonlight streaming through the sliver between the drapes.

The moonlight glinted off something silvery metallic, and her breath caught so hard she almost had a coughing fit.

She recognized that gleam, and her lips tightened.

"If you're here to finish the job you started all those years ago, you needn't bother. Time will take care of me soon enough."

"I came for you, and you survived?" The man's voice sounded rusty, as though it were rarely used. "You must have been very good."

"I was."

And that was a source of pride to her, that she'd competed in a man's world and, if not won herself, made every man there fight for his win. Honesty compelled her to add, "But that day was as much luck as it was skill."

She studied the dark corner, where she could just make out his silhouette along with the light shining off his metal arm. "I doubt any amount of skill could save me from you now."

Now the man laughed, and that sounded even worse than his voice. "Good for you that's not why I'm here."

"If not that, then why are you bothering me?"

"You knew him."

"I knew a lot of people."

"The man on the bridge." The man in the shadows stepped forward, and now that her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Peggy could make out the pale blur that was his face as well as his metal arm. The rest of him remained shrouded in darkness, but that was likely because he wore dark clothing.

"What man on what bridge?" Peggy asked, though she remembered the news footage clearly enough - Steve fighting for his life against a man with a metal arm. Much of that footage had been grainy, unclear, caught by cell phone cameras rather than news crews. Even through the lousy imaging, Peggy had recognized the man who fought Steve as the one who'd tried to kill her so many years before.

"Steve Rogers. Captain America. You knew him. There was a film of you at the exhibit at the Smithsonian."

No point in arguing that further, Peggy thought. Still, "Why does it matter that I knew him?"

"Because maybe you knew me." The man came forward, reached for the switch to the lamp beside her bed.

Peggy closed her eyes against the flare of light, blinked until they'd adjusted to the change in illumination and looked at her visitor. The kind of blue eyes a romance novel would call "piercing," unkempt dark hair falling almost to his shoulders, a mouth that seemed made for sin. Familiar, all of it, but not so familiar that she could place a name to him immediately.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I recognize you, but I don't remember your name."

"He called me Bucky." There was a pause. "And the exhibit - there was a picture of me. James -"

"Sergeant Barnes!"

"Yes. James Buchanan Barnes."

"Good Lord." Peggy shook her head against her pillow, willing herself to understand the inconceivable. This man had fallen from a train into a chasm hundreds of feet deep- in 1943. And yet, he stood here in front of her now. "How on earth did you survive?"

"I don't know," her visitor - Sergeant Barnes - said. "They'd experimented on me before."

"Before?"

"Before the fall. Maybe it saved my life." His smile was humorless. "Maybe I would've been better off if it hadn't."

There wasn't much she could say to that, Peggy thought, so she ignored it and focused on the more pressing concern. "Why are you here, Sergeant?"

"I know that's who I was, but I don't remember being that person. Tell me what you know. About me. Please."

Though he kept his expression neutral, the desperation in the Winter Soldier's - no, Barnes' - eyes tore at Peggy's heart. There was no way she could refuse his request even if she'd wanted to.

"The first time we met, I had no idea what to expect," Peggy began. "Steve was on a USO tour of Europe when he heard your unit was captured, and that you'd all been written off as lost. Somehow, he convinced Howard Stark to fly him behind enemy lines, alone."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because you mattered to him. So much." Peggy struggled to push herself into a sitting position, and then Barnes was there, his cybernetic arm easily pulling her up. "Thank you."

She'd half expected him to withdraw back into the shadows where he'd stood before, but he hesitated for a moment, then pulled up a visitor's chair and sat.

"What happened?"

Peggy smiled, seeing the scene in her mind as though it had happened only yesterday, not seventy years before. "He snuck into a Hydra base and destroyed it, freeing you and hundreds of other prisoners. Then he led you all back to our position, the grandest of victory parades even though we were still at war. That was the first time I saw you."

"They'd already been experimenting on me." Barnes' expression was distant now, as though he were looking back into the past rather than at her.

"You never told anyone." Peggy was careful to keep her tone neutral, not accusing.

"Wouldn'ta done any good." The Brooklyn accent came out more strongly, and Peggy wondered if he were seeing her as she was then, if he even remembered her. "It would only have kept me outta combat."

"You wanted to go back into combat?"

"I wanted to take care of him, make sure he was okay. Punk never did know when to back down."

Peggy laughed softly, pleased when it didn't turn into a cough, as so much of her laughter did these days, a holdover, no doubt, from all the unusual things she'd encountered during her work with the OSS and then SHIELD.

"No, he didn't," she agreed. "And you were a lot like him in that respect."

"He was a hero."

"So were you," Peggy said gently.

"He volunteered. I was drafted."

Peggy had to wonder if he realized he was becoming less the Winter Soldier as they talked, or whether it was a deliberate deception. She hoped the former, but wouldn't rule out the latter. In any event, she couldn't let his perception stand unchallenged.

"You weren't drafted into the Commandos," she reminded him. "You chose to be one. And, regardless of whether you were drafted originally, your war record speaks for itself. You're a hero, too, Sergeant, as much as he is."

"Maybe I was then. Not now."

"Bollocks."

Barnes started at her emphatic tone. "What?"

"It's your choices that make you who you are. You didn't choose to be the Winter Soldier, to do the things they made you do. You _can_ choose what you do now. Let _those_ choices define you, not the ones that were made for you."

Barnes appeared to consider that for a long moment. Then he glanced at her with a smile that, while not quite the one Peggy remembered from the war, was still quite charming in itself, perhaps more so for the melancholy that lay beneath it.

"Were you this smart back then?"

Peggy laughed again. "I like to think I was, but I probably wasn't."

"I'm glad you are now." Barnes hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was tentative. "Is there … is there anything I can do for you?"

Oh, there were layers to that question, Peggy knew, layers both of them knew existed but that neither of them would ever admit aloud. The Peggy Carter she'd been before might have found some of them abhorrent, if she'd even recognized them, but the Peggy Carter she was now understood them all - especially the unspoken offer to give her a quick, painless end.

For a moment, she considered letting him - it would be a quick and easy end, compared to the one that awaited her. But she'd never done anything the easy way in all ninety-odd years of her life. She wasn't about to start now.

"Just secure the window when you go, Sergeant," she said. "And if you find yourself out this way again, do warn me so I can have some tea waiting for you."

"I'm more of a coffee guy," Barnes replied, and then looked surprised to have said it. He shook that reaction off and rose to his feet. "Thank you, Peggy."

"That's Director Carter to you, Sergeant."

Barnes' chuckle lingered in the room even after he closed the window behind him, and Peggy fell asleep to its echo in her mind.


End file.
